Aging Eyes Present Some Paradoxes

Here’s an interesting paradox, as your eyes age they begin to shrink, however as they are shrinking they are becoming more liquid. It’s one of those funny oddities in life. It is also the cause of some of the eye floaters you may be seeing, even as you read these words.

Floaters In Eye

Floaters are small inclusions in that tend to be concentrated right around the macula. The macula is an area of the eye that serves a two-fold purpose. It not only is the outlet for blood vessels and nerves of the eye, but it is also the focal point for your eye.

Even more interesting is the aging process, though it is the primary cause of floaters for most of us is quite natural, it is also accompanied by an interesting phenomenon as your eyes shrink, your normal eyesight changes.

If you have had farsightedness for years, you will suddenly find that changes in the shape of the eye, due to aging, which can also introduce inclusions of the eye or eye floaters, you will suddenly find that the focal spot for your eye has moved from the macula and that your suddenly good close-in vision has gone and you need reading glasses. The process also will cause small inclusions to sneak around the walls of the macula into the vitreous and you will likely find that, even if you have never had eye floaters before, you have them now.

Are they anything to worry about? No, but they do introduce an interesting paradox and that is as your eyesight changes, rending your farsightedness moot and potentially introducing floaters, if you have the opposite condition, nearsightedness, your focal point and the macula start coming together as your eyes begin to feel more pressure and they tend to change (farsighted people will have eyes that tend to shorten as they age, allowing for more inclusions to sneak in, while nearsighted people, whose eyes are short to begin with suddenly find their eyes are beginning to change an become a little less round, moving the focal point and improving their vision. Yes, this condition can introduce inclusions around the macula, too, so their floaters may also increase.

It is a funny contradiction that the very people with great eyes as kids will need reading glasses or even driving glasses as they age while those with lousy vision will tend to find they have to read screens from further away or if they read magazines, they will find themselves holding them out further or taking off their standard glasses. It’s equally as funny, though, that the changes brought on by aging that improve or degrade eyesight, will also cause floaters in the eye to potentially increase.

And, no floaters are no indication you are losing your sight. You are just seeing things floating across the vitreous that you’ve never seen before and, if your brain works right, you may never see again, unless a new one crops up for a day or two and it may disappear or it may become part of what you normally see and you’ll forget and look around it anyway.

Doctors Look at Aging as One Cause of Floaters

Although nobody likes to think about it, from the moment we enter this world, after floating around in mommy’s body for nine long months of gestation, we begin to age.

As babies and toddlers everything you do is geared toward learning and your little body is engineered so that if you fall down and bump yourself, there’s enough body fat around to absorb things.

However, as you get on in years toward adulthood things begin to change. Those bumps and bruises hurt more because the fat has gone away and things become a lot more stressful on all your body systems

By the time you enter your middle years things begin to happen – you and no one else has control over them, despite all the fish oil, special vitamins, salves, gels and anti-aging potions on the market. For example, about 40 or so you will likely begin to see little black things floating in your eye. They are eye floaters and have more to do with your eye changing and shrinking a bit hear and becoming a little more liquid there that causes them.

Eye floaters are a natural part of the aging process. As you get older, entering your 50s or so, you begin to notice them a bit more. They may appear as little bubbles, or dark spots or even spider webs. You can relax because its just Mother Nature playing her practical joke on your aging body because she is giving you a reason to worry about your eyesight.

Floaters In Eye

No one likes floaters, but they do happen, especially in the 50s when the area around the macula – the rear of the eye that is not only in the focal plane of the cornea lens and vitreous of your eye – begins to change. At one time or another, the area around the macula may actually shrink enough to allow clusters of cells or individual cells to enter into the vitreous body of the eye. They will tend, ophthalmologists say, to cluster right around the macula and so you will see them as part of your world as you look straight ahead.

As you age further, the nature of the eye may become slightly more liquid and larger clusters of cells may float into the vitreous from the walls formed by the sides of the macula and you may possibly see more of them. Indeed, when you close your eyes, you may even see flashes of light. Again, these are benign as are the floaters in your eye that have appeared as you age.

As you continue to age, the eye tends to shrink a bit and more floaters may be introduced through small – non-operable – tears in the retina. The tears are microscopic but are the result of aging and the ongoing shrinkage that your eye is undergoing. The flashes are also a benign result and are just another form of floater.

In all this, there is one thing of which you can be certain as your eye ages and shrinks a bit; little bits and pieces are going to become floaters as inclusion in the vitreous. Relax, there’s nothing wrong, but biology taking its course.